Much of the popularity and usage coming from hardware manufacturers who had no platform of their own, or from cheap down and dirty manufacturers you've never heard of.
Adding up the sales of Motorla, LG, Samsung and HTC equals less than 50% of total Android unit sales. These companies represent the "premium" phones and manufacturers who were enabled to compete with Apple, RIM and Microsoft via Android. The other 50% of Android phones are unheard of models from unknown manufacturers, in Godknowswhereistan.
In a way, it's kind of good that a single OS can run on everything from a free phone to a premium model, but the feature set and hardware is hardly standard, leaving "the Android experience" largely without meaning, if not in fact ultimately damaging the brand.
I'm not seeing the branding win when Android can mean the OS on a flagship Motorola phone and the OS on $10 knockoff phone.

You can easily run something that didn't come from the app store. It works the same way as the iPhone, allowing for ad hoc installation of software, and even management of software for enterprise customers. You do need to sign up as a developer to do so and to get the tools to do so.
It’s primarily intended as a way to distribute beta/prerelease versions of applications, or for organizations who develop applications for internal use.
How do you think developers get their apps-in-progress onto iOS devices for testing? Dev's are limited to 100 users, enterprise customers are not.

For casual users buying and selling on eBay, especially selling at less thn first paid, I would agree with not paying taxes. This is targeting people operating ongoing online businesses that compete with offline businesses, yet pay no state, federal, local or sales taxes. Either all reselling should be tax free, or all taxed - what's going on now is unfair to businesses that do pay taxes & duties.

There is no infringement until Android software is applied to some hardware and sold. It is the combination of the two that creates the infringement.
Google is covered in this, except possibly taking a hit for enabling infringement.
You cannot patent an idea, only a method. You build a mousetrap, you cannot patent "mousetraps"; you can however patent the method by which your mousetrap works. Others can build mousetraps, but to avoid infringing your patent, they would have to come up with a different method of trapping mice.

You can't patent an idea like "Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor", but you can patent a method for doing it.
Other companies are free to develop other methods of implementing the idea, but Apple has a patent on their particular method.

I don't believe any company has lost as much money as Apple due to not having proper patents and enforcing them. Microsoft alone built a large part of their business courtesy of Apple's prior ineffective enforcement, from Windows to QuickTime and a lot in between.

The fact is, if Apple had not done multitouch first, they would have nothing to patent.

Since they had the vision, did the R&D, bought a few companies and released an actual product incorporating the technology, it would seem they are entitled to a patent on that work. If there is nothing unique or prior art in the patent, it will not stand anyway.